I’ve just been watching Fight Club again and come to the conclusion that we have to drive into the skid if we ever want to get anywhere. I don’t mean capitulate and fit in with the norm: I think we should run away with the extraordinary. You know the old detective saying, ‘if the only thing left sounds crazy, then that’s probably the truth!’ So, the yellow brick road and the wisdom of the green wizard is the way to go.

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I can't believe it's been 2 months since my last rant..& so much has happened I've no idea where to start!

Well, against all odds we pulled off our

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In Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming I found myself saying that post-hoc understanding of what you've written can be immensely useful, much more so than reading a textbook about how you 'should' do things before you write. The latter is like seeing a new fashion in a magazine and buying the dress to wear without trying it on: who would do that? The former is like trying it on in the shop to see how it looks on your body: as we all know, there are always some current fashions which are just wrong for our particular build. By the time you've written a piece and really revised it, you know it extremely well. If you then try some ideas about how good writing works on it, you're much more likely to decide whether they're the right shape for your work. If those ideas don't seem to fit, you're more likely to have the confidence to discard them. What leads to disaster is to be so sure the rules - like the fashion - must be right and your body must be wrong that you wear something that makes you look dreadful or, worse still, sign up for plastic surgery.

Not that writing to fulfil technical brief - as an exercise - doesn't have its uses.

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I can't believe it, but I'm actually feeling more like a normal human being today, bloody hell and put out the ruddy bunting. I feel today that there might actually be a glimmer of hope out there somewhere, but not of course in the publishing trade. That remains, as ever, a veritable pit of darkness and despair. Ah 'tis a place of strange mystery, Carruthers, from which nobody returns alive, or at least in human form ...

First thing this morning, I was bizarrely cheered whilst waving goodbye to Lord H to see a young man in a blue shirt walking an extremely large and very coiffured (is that a word?) poodle past the end of the garden path. It was really almost the size of a sheep. Perhaps it was a sheep, I don't really know. Strange things do happen in Godalming. But a poodle-walker is definitely a first here in the shires. For the rest of the morning, I have been having a wonderful massage courtesy of the lovely and really rather pregnant (should she be doing massage in her condition??) Laura. When she got to my notoriously stiff-as-boards shoulders, she was putting so much effort into beating the tension into submission that I feared she might give birth there and then. But luckily not. That would have been a terrifying start to my birthday weekend ...


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The weirdest thing, I must record it. I've been struggling with the final scenes in the book, not the denouement which I wrote a while ago but the last arc of the action. One of the things that's been a real problem for me is this character who keeps going into hiding. I know why she's hiding.

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I felt almost Biggles-ish as I put on my headphones and microphone and strapped myself in. Taking off was amazing and the dip forward once we were in the air would have been a bit of a shock if Hubby hadn't warned me about it and the other strange sensation was when we banked right and I found myself looking vertically at the ground as it fell away. Once we were up though - well. No words are truly fitting! Essex sank below us and what took its place was a panarama of fields and villages and hamlets and cars the size of ants. I was amazed at how many people have swimming pools in their back gardens! We had to stop at a small local airport for refuelling so we had to disembark. I took several photos of small aircraft and a large hangar featuring the phrase 'Area 51' (to anyone not in the know that's the American airforce's worst kept secret where there have been all kind of links wih UFOs and other strange aerial phenomena). Then we were back in and on our way to London.


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My editor, Chris, actually moves his hand sideways as he says this as though the words will appear in the air.

“A writer’s favourite two words to write,” Sid, my agent, says. “I imagine.”

“You’re correct,” I, the writer, tell him. “For the second book I wrote those first just to experience the joyful elation they bring. Unfortunately I still had eighty thousand words to write.”

“Why didn’t you write them for the first book?” Chris asks.

“What do you mean?”

We’re sitting in the café that has become our regular meeting place in the last three months. Not that we meet often. Chris has James Hardy to worry about. He leans forward. “Clear History. The book we’re actually publishing now.”

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It's no good. Today was never going to be my day. I woke in a foul mood, snappy as a handbag, and didn't improve as the hours wore on. I wrote a few words, not quite 500. I finished re-reading A bit on the side by William Trevor. I shopped, and chored my way through the afternoon. All day I have been struck by the thought that you have to be heartless to be a writer. To write truthfully and meaningfully, with compassion, you have to put aside all qualms about articulating pain and provoking it in your reader.


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Sylvia and I had a great night in on Sunday; we spent four hours rabbitting on about our school-days and old friends, family and God-knows-what-else. The only strange thing about it (to some people) is that I was in Glasgow, and she, in the vicinity of Chesterfield. Boy, can we talk on the phone; we had toilet and coffee breaks, and she had a bottle of wine and probably about a thousand fags – we broke off before the call reached the hour limits so it cost nothing. The sensible, older woman – that’s us. Yeah right!

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